Email from Russia

From Marcus Warren in Moscow, exclusively for news.telegraph

12:00AM BST 07 Aug 2001

THE icy waters of the Barents Sea watch over their secrets as jealously as the Russian military guard theirs. Occasionally, however, the mysteries of both are laid bare for the rest of us to marvel at.

One secret neither the fish nor the Navy will be surrendering soon is the cause of last summer's sinking of the Kursk. There is much excitement over the operation to raise the nuclear submarine.

But the plan to leave the bow section on the seabed ensures that we will be no wiser as to why its torpedoes exploded - sending the vessel to the bottom with all its crew - a year ago this Sunday.

Nevertheless, one minor incident briefly reported last week threw a revealing light on the tensions and rivalries that still bedevil this bleak Arctic wilderness.

Official protests from one state to a neighbour are somewhat rare nowadays. But Russia was so exercised by a recent close encounter between one of its admirals on board a helicopter and an Orion Norwegian reconnaissance plane over the Barents Sea that it fired off a letter of complaint.

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The incident took place in international air space and the Norwegians deny that their pilot was behaving irresponsibly. But the fact that the Russian admiral who had the wind put up him by the Norwegian aircraft was Admiral Mikhail Motsak, head of the Kursk salvage operation, and that he was flying to the operation site at the time gave the episode a little extra edge.

In theory, the Kursk tragedy has been a stirring example of nations putting aside their differences to help out in an emergency. Last August a Norwegian vessel carrying a British submarine-rescue craft rushed to the scene of the accident. After some, admittedly bloody-minded, delay, the Russians even allowed the foreign divers access to the stricken Kursk.

This year the contract to raise the submarine has been awarded to a Dutch firm. Most of the divers involved are Scottish. The operation's logistics are being managed from the Norwegian port of Kirkenes.

And yet old habits die hard and few dogs are as reluctant to learn new tricks as Admiral Motsak.

Now, however, I discover that Admiral Motsak is not just a senior ranking officer of the Northern Fleet. He is a bit of an armchair geo-strategist and Cold War warrior as well.

The military threat on Russia's north western and Arctic borders has not disappeared, it is increasing, he believes. He argues for enhanced use of "indirect action in military and economic zones of Russia's national interests". And, after the United States, he identifies Norway as a Nato member harbouring particularly hostile intentions towards Russia.

The Norwegians, understandably, feel a bit hard done by. Post Cold-War cuts in their military manpower have left them with no units larger than a battalion, 700-800 men. The Russians, for their part, have a marine and a motorised infantry brigade (3,000 men in each) just across the border, (not to mention the world's largest concentration of nuclear reactors, active or decommissioned).

As for Norway's radar stations at Longyear City and Barde, Gen Leonid Ivashov, until recently the hawkish head of the Russian Defence Ministry's International Cooperation department, once threatened to nuke the things on the grounds that they were supposedly the advance guard of a US "son-of-Star-Wars" missile defence shield.

Being polite, Nordic types, the Norwegians have chosen to ignore most of the sabre-rattling. Admiral Motsak's intemperate outburst, published in an official Defence Ministry journal, "Military Thought", they prefer to put down to rivalry for scarce resources between members of Russia's top brass.

All the same, attitudes similar to the admiral's are in vogue inside and outside the armed forces. What the military lack in firepower, they try to make up for with gung-ho rhetoric. And they are given renewed encouragement by the appearance of documents such as the new "Naval Doctrine", approved by President Putin last week.

Russia often huffs and puffs about Nato submarines patrolling in the Barents Sea. It even claimed to let off 50 depth charges to keep intruders away from the Kursk's sea grave last year.

Such thinking may explain another misunderstanding currently souring relations between Russia and its longest standing Nato neighbour. Russia justifies the haste with which it is trying to raise the Kursk by arguing that it has a moral duty to remove the submarine's twin nuclear reactors from the seabed.

Naively or disingenuously - take your pick - the Norwegians have taken the Russians at their word. They have asked that a small team of their civilian experts be allowed on board the divers' support vessel to measure radiation during the salvage project.

With just over a month to go before the submarine is hauled to the surface, they are still waiting for a reply.